Use some fuzzy math with me for a minute. Let�s say that 3 years and 9 months represents the amount of time it took this country to fight World War Two. That�s about right, isn�t it? Early December of 1941 until August of 1945.

Now let�s say that 3 years and 6 months have elapsed since the 11th of September, 2001. Again, pretty close, fuzzy wise.

I can�t believe the amount of time is so similar. For one thing, I�ll remember 2001 and that particular day for the rest of my life, and it seems like it was two weeks ago in a lot of ways.

My parents and their whole generation lived through the Second World War. It was the most tumultuous upheaval in history, everything changed. I�m speaking in terms of life before and after that war, and the events of history that have been born of that struggle and all the changes it wrought in 3 years and 9 months. I watch the History Channel quite a bit, all the WW2 coverage and so forth, I�ve talked at length with folks of that era and I still can�t believe the amount of stuff they did during that time. Seems like 10 years would not have been enough time.

And sometime in June 2005, the amount of days spent on a War on Terror and a war that changed everything will equal out.

I feel a great deal of empathy for the generation of my parents. I believe I�d have been a lot more comfortable with those times, as awful and as traumatic as I�m sure they were. I know I�d have been more in tune with the morals of the time, the self reliance, the compassion. I�ve spent a lot of years watching that sort of life die gradually around me, and in a wretched and little lamented way.

I get the feeling we�re waiting for something, maybe our own Hiroshima, to put a stamp on this Terror War of ours. Trussing up bin Laden with a rope dipped in pork bellies, flying him to Brooklyn on a very fast jet and skinning him out with a rusty Bowie in Times Square sounds about right. I�ll volunteer to staple the pelt to the barn door with my own staple gun. I have several, and they�re quite nice.

I just wish that the feeling of victory, of completing a just cause would come as easily as VE or VJ Day did so many years ago. We may one day have our Hiroshima but it seems to me that ending is more the gutting of a terrible and marauding animal than the stamp of rightness, of better days to come.

Also, a haunting suspicion. That the grim men of 1945 would have had this job done already. All barber shop heroics aside, quality ass kicking seemed to really work back then.

Maybe that�s why they got it done so fast.

(And by the by, I know WW2 actually started in 1939. I know this stuff. Work with me here. I�m selfishly including just us in this tome. You know, us. Thanks for reading.)

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